Modesto is Besto | A Love Letter to the Spanish Lower Leagues
This piece first appeared in the now sold out Issue №7 of Futbolista Magazine. Go support the mag, it’s class!
It’s December 2019 and I’m buckled into the back seat of an Uber hurtling out of the Spanish capital towards the wider Comunidad de Madrid. Christmas-themed street lights twinkle through steamed up windows as I take a sip from the unusually tall can of Mahou bought for the journey to El Àlamo.
As the cityscape begins to flatten and the darkness of the campo takes hold a sense of adventure begins to surge. Conversations which had begun with polite introductions around names and geographical locations back home on the low slung terraces of Estadio Boetticher, home to S.A.D Villaverde San Andrès had continued at pace with new friends. Our digitally acquired getaway driver openly perplexed as to why she was driving us to this sleepy little town and away from the city throngs.
It had been a day that had started like most when visiting the place I used to call my home. Bleary eyed after a long but exhilarating evening meandering through Madrid’s narrow and character filled streets. I have always been fascinated by Spain; the tiny food, the over-animated chatter, its history often shrouded in secrecy and the fierce pride felt by the residents of its seventeen autonomous regions, each one providing a unique strand to a grand Iberian tapestry through language and tradition. There are the long days and the even longer nights and of course there was my salvation that morning, football, with the capital at its epicentre.
During my all too short stint as a bonafide madrileño back in 2017 I had hopped my way around all the big football sights. The grandeur of the Santiago Bernabeu on a Champions League night. The fifty-five minute crush on the metro out to Atlético Madrid’s shiny new home, the Wanda Metropolitano, accompanied by the inevitable sound of fans still pining after the Vicente Calderon. Heartbreakingly it is now nothing more than rubble on the banks of the Manzanares.
Away from the big two, Portazgo metro station drops you into a bustling barrio under the shadows of the Campo de Fútbol Vallecas, home to Rayo Vallecano. Providing a pre-match vitality and an infectious charm that will leave even the most hard-to-please football travellers swooning.
There were trips out to the ever-growing satellite towns of Getafe, Leganes, Alcorcón and Fuenlabrada. Once distinct they have slowly been engulfed by the sprawl of Madrid growing to produce a new generation of unlikely Primera and Segunda sides. Their homes may be more functional, a circumstance of their rise, but watch the late evening sun set over Butarque or tear into a bocadillo con lomo y queso at the Municipal de Santo Domingo and you will soon realise that these too are destinations not to be missed.
In Madrid you can get your football fix at all these places but for the acutest of highs you have to look a little deeper. The world of fútbol modesto awaits and is ready to welcome you.
Translated as “modest football” and sometimes called fútbol autentico there are no selfie sticks or €100 tickets here. Games contested in the lower reaches of the Spanish pyramid almost always start early and finish late and a day taking in just one game is not really a day at all. There is a romance to being inside a football ground as the late morning sun emerges, the hazy hues that have wrapped themselves around jagged skylines transforming to sapphire blue. An ice cold one euro beer in hand helping to take the edge off as the smell of frying pork wafts tantalisingly up your nostrils as players who have no doubt been partying just as hard as you get to work, the gentle thudding of leather on leather setting the rhythm for what you know will be a good day to come.
My awakening came back in 2017 during puente, that weird little “working” day between bank holidays and the weekend that most take off anyway in Spain. I hadn’t discovered groundhopping apps yet but an old school Google search led me north to Chamartin where AD Union Adarve would defeat Galicians Coruxo 1–0 under the gaze of the Cuatro Torres, a quartet of skyscrapers that dominate vistas across Madrid which loom particularly large over the bare concrete terrace of the Polideportivo Vicente Del Bosque just a road crossing away.
A long walk past futsal pitches and tennis courts led to an iron gate. One man handing over little stubs of entry for free and another selling assorted black and red merchandise from a big cardboard box. These were the characters that I recognised from non-league adventures at home and that recognition continued once I walked down the narrow path towards the solitary stand. Children playing, more engrossed in their own games than the one they had turned up to see. Elders chatting, laughing and waving their hands in the air, the busy looking officials sporting clubwear and of course the ole-ole-ole’s from the small bunch of ultras located in one corner. It felt like home.
Since that day I have fallen in love over and over again with Madrid’s less visited outposts. There has been the Estadio Municipal de Val, home of RSD Alcalá, its deep curves allowing for the hordes to surge as the home side went 1–0 up on visiting AD San Juan. In the summer the painted red and white terraces glisten in the strong Spanish sun with the trees of the Los Catalanes nature reserve providing the most verdant of backdrops. It’s not always sunny though, one afternoon was spent huddled underneath some hastily bought and very flimsy umbrellas, as the players of Alcalá and AD Parla battled through the wind and rain. The half time sprint to a local bar for a warming espresso shot of caldo, a stock based soup where fat twinkles on the surface, providing a welcome interlude from the winter deluges.
There have been the graffitied blue and white walls of Aravaca C.F’s Estadio Antonio Sanfiz where your six euro match ticket doubles as discounted entry for the local nightclub. There is the old interior bar of El Álamo’s Estadio Facundo Rivas, a small screen hangs loosely in the corner showing La Liga as a real live game rages on just a few steps away. A couple of weeks after my visit El Álamo would host Real Mallorca in the Copa Del Rey, a 93rd minute own goal depriving the little club the greatest result in their history.
For many “B” teams are the scourge of the Spanish lower leagues but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t criss-cross a motorway like a caña filled lunatic to see them hopefully be defeated. The Instalación Deportiva Butarque C.D. Leganés, home of Leganés B, is one such place. After a few beers in the wonderfully named barrio of Zarzaquemada we hightailed it across the M-421 to a Tercera Division game played in immaculate surroundings, watched with a boisterous travelling support from Carabanchel who spent the afternoon getting high off their own supply.
I say “we” a lot during these adventures because with new discoveries come new friends. When I first arrived in Spain I visited games alone, unable to convince my colleagues about the merits of getting up early on a Sunday morning as the reverbs of the night before still battered through their brains. Social media, despite it’s constant simmering rage, can though still perform its primary function and connect you with others who think your way.
I met Lester on that first trip to Alcala de Hernanes. No guiri (a rather lazy catch all term for foreigners that stand out as being pretty obviously not a local to Spain) knows more about lower league football in Madrid and I have yet to attend a game where his presence is not met with a hello. Then came Roddy, a fellow Scot with a pretty nifty vlog still standing about the Spanish lower leagues, where a bond was quickly formed over our nation’s penchant for failure and a shared knowledge of Scottish football, he as a former player for Angus side Brechin Victoria and me as a well known consumer of pies.
Through them I would meet Andrew, Matt, Alex and Tommy. The latter three my companions in that taxi out to El Álamo, although the biggest cheer that evening was reserved for Lester’s arrival at half time, cervezas in hand with the game all but done. There are others, like Pidge, the curator of El Museo de la Ponferradina, a shrine to Las Blanquiazules found not in their home province of Castile y León but in the English cathedral city of York plus even more who’s real life acquaintance I’ve yet to make.
Lester and Matt’s latest brainchild is Dia del Futbol Modesto, a groundhoppers dream meticulously planned to maximise your footballing day in the Spanish capital. It’s growth has even seen clubs move fixtures in the hope of attracting it’s fandom providing the easiest of excuses to visit a city that I often miss greatly.
Football is everything in Madrid, sometimes through the lens of Los Galacticos and Cholisimo it can seem too much, but with fútbol modesto you can experience something more. You get to know the names of the women behind the counter that slap bocatas in your hand, the old men who spin the wheel of half time fortune, to spend time casually gazing at the banners and noticeboard walls. You get to see villages and towns you never would never normally see and have conversations that consist of far more than “excuse me” and “I think you are sitting in my seat”. Most importantly though, in a world that never wants to stop, you give yourself time to breathe.
Football in the lower leagues across the world is special but fútbol modesto is that little bit more special to me.
For more details on Futbol Modesto follow DDFM on Twitter, it makes it’s triumphant return to the lower leagues of Spanish football this weekend in Madrid. One day soon I’ll be able to return and join them.